Leah Dieterich Talks About Monogamy, iChats, and the Leap to Memoir

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Vanishing Twins: A Marriage (Soft Skull Press, 2018) is a rumination on desire, creativity, and the people who complete us. Told in elegant, precise vignettes, author Leah Dieterich uses ballet, philosophy, pop culture, and literature to gently tilt and examine the many facets of her identity.

Dieterich got in touch with me when she moved from Los Angeles to Portland, Oregon, this year—I’m a recent transplant from New York—and we started going to readings and writing events in PDX together. Earlier this summer we spoke about monogamy, performance, and craft at her dining room table, a fuzzy outline of her sleeping daughter on the baby monitor between us.

The Millions: Was there a particular incident or feeling that spurred Vanishing Twins?

Leah Dieterich: I was writing a novel that was based on myself and my advertising partner, where I was imagining that we were running away from our jobs and responsibilities and taking a VW van up to Big Sur. I had been working on this novel for a couple of months, and then this one night when I was writing at a café in Santa Monica (where I ended up writing most of the book), it started to take a different turn.

I started writing about the French ligature with the O and the E smashed together, and I really didn’t know how it fit into the scene that I was writing, but it was coming out. I remember feeling so good about it but also concerned. I knew I wanted to follow this thread, but I had no idea what it had to do with the novel. At the same time, it felt like an epiphany. I realized that instead of the novel, this was what I wanted to write about. I wanted to explore my actual life in these weird ways—not necessarily as straightforward memoir, but using the interests I have in language and in other writers and thinkers to explore certain events and themes in my real life, rather than trying to make things up. I finally gave myself permission. I said, “I just want to write about my own life and that’s OK.”

TM: I’ve been reading a lot of Sheila Heti, somebody who’s known for straddling that line between fiction and non-fiction. How Should a Person Be? is a “novel” but—

LD: I think the subtitle of that book is A Novel from Life.

TM: Yes! And Motherhood has an unnamed narrator, but in How Should a Person Be? the narrator is also named Sheila. And of course real-life Sheila also has a best friend named Margot, same as in the book. Were you ever tempted to call Vanishing Twins fiction?

LD: Yeah. Once I started being really honest about my story, I got scared and thought, “Maybe I should call this a novel.” It felt like a way to hide, perhaps. I tried to query agents with it as an autobiographical novel in the vein of Sheila Heti’s book, but in the end, the agent who wanted to represent me called it a memoir (since I think I’d had a casual conversation with her about whether to call it fiction or nonfiction) and I was like, “OK. If you wanna call it a memoir, and you think you can sell it as a memoir, then let’s go for it.” I didn’t really have to do anything to the book to call it a memoir. I’d already changed all the names of the characters from my life, and since that’s totally acceptable in memoir, I just kept them the same as they’d been when it was called a novel. The names were an important part of the narrative or structure of the book—having all three of my main characters’ names begin with E.

TM: I was wondering about that choice.

LD: Yes. I wanted to make them feel sort of interchangeable. I wanted them to overlap.

TM: Did the people—the three Es—know you were going to write about them?

LD: Yes. I had written a short story inspired by my relationship with Elena before I started this book, and she’d seen that. My work colleague, Ethan, also knew; I had written a short story with characters inspired by us that I’d shown him. That scene actually appears in the book.

Eric (my husband) always knew that I would be writing about our life. I didn’t have him read the book until I thought it was ready to send out to agents. At that point, I’d already had my mentor, Sarah Manguso, read it and give me edits on two separate occasions over the course of two years. The first time my husband read it, he said it was beautiful but he didn’t like the way that he was portrayed. To his credit, he was like, “I’m not the audience for this book and I still think you should send it out.” I did send it out, although somewhat reluctantly, and luckily I didn’t get an agent for it then. It was kind of a relief because if someone had been like, “We want this,” and then I would have had to decide if I wanted to sell the book knowing he was unhappy with it, that would’ve been horrible. Some of the agents that rejected it had interesting feedback that I read to him and he total agreed with. I thought, “If I work on the book with this feedback in mind, hopefully it will satisfy this, or any other agent, and also my husband.” I showed him the manuscript before I sent it to a new batch of agents and he was like, “This is amazing–this version totally solves all of my problems and I think it’s incredible.” In the end, it worked. He was happy and I got an agent, but it took a year of revisions until I queried again, right before I was about to give birth to my daughter. That had been my deadline for myself.

I think the process of revising the book helped our relationship in a certain way. It helped me have more perspective on the time in our lives that I was writing about, to have delved into it more deeply. I think that’s why the book ended up being better. I think before, I was just scratching the surface with his character, and mine too for that matter. We weren’t full people on the page.

TM: So it wasn’t that you didn’t include enough about him, but maybe you just needed to include—

LD: The right things. I was so selective in what I had chosen to remember, but luckily, I had a lot of documentation. During that time in our life, we had been living apart, (he in New York and I in Los Angeles) so much of our communication was written.

TM: Emails?

LD: iChats. A lot of instant message. I would save all of the conversations that felt significant, both with him and with Elena (who lived in London). I had all of that. I knew that I would do something with it someday, so I saved it all. I literally went through about 20 chat transcripts that were each two to three hours long. This is weirdly masochistic and totally the way I operate, but instead of just reading them, I transcribed them all word for word. I had read some of them many times already for research, but I tended to skim them. Transcribing forced me to relive them. I spent a few months just doing that every single day. I’d be at the coffee shop crying over my laptop because I felt like I was in that moment again, but this time I could be the observer, too, which was even more heartbreaking for me. I could drop into the role of myself eight or nine years ago, but also see her from a distance.

TM: That’s crazy to think about going back through and kind of reliving it.

LD: It was amazing.

TM: You incorporate a bunch of outside texts into Vanishing Twins. Did you write the narrative first and then go through and add in the research bits? Or would things jump out at you as you were constructing the story?

LD: That’s a great question. One of the main outside texts isA Lover’s Discourse, by Roland Barthes. I was obsessed with that book. I’d bought it while we were living apart. I hadn’t started writing Vanishing Twins yet, but years later when I was working on the book, I’d be writing these little snippets of action, a scene I remembered from my life and it would remind me of something from A Lover’s Discourse, or from Adam Phillips’s Monogamy and I’d think “I should go get that and look at it.” When I’d feel blocked, I’d transcribe all of the quotes I’d underlined in these books. That way I felt like I was always accomplishing something even if it wasn’t generating new material. Once I copied down all the things I’d underlined, they started finding their ways in or inspiring new sections.

When my husband and I moved back in together after living apart for nearly three years we went to dinner at a friend’s house in LA and the friend started talking about Adam Phillips, and he was like, “Have you read Monogamy? It’s amazing.” He brought this little book down from the shelf. I don’t remember perfectly because I was really drunk, but I remember being upset about the book and its title, because though my husband and I had closed our open relationship, I was still very anti-monogamy in theory. We borrowed it and my husband read it, and was like, “This is amazing. I think you’d really like it.” I was resistant but I acquiesced and once I did, I was like, “Oh my God.” I was floored. That book changed my life. It complicated everything I thought about monogamy and made it seem dangerous (which I liked) and a worthy challenge, instead of something boring you do out of laziness.

[Monogamy] is so short. There’s basically just a paragraph on each page. They’re vignettes, or propositions. As I began writing Vanishing Twins, that book started to find its way in too. I write in a program called Scrivener. Do you use it?

TM: I don’t, but people love it.

LD: I really love it. Especially for this type of book where there’s a lot of short sections that are interchangeable. I would spend hours rearranging them. It’s really easy to do because each section is listed in a column on the left and you can just drag and drop them and move them around. Before I started using it, I was using Word and I had like 20 pages and I just couldn’t keep track of everything. I think having Scrivener helped the book start to grow, just from a file organization standpoint. It’s a really important part of how the book came together.

TM: In Vanishing Twins there’s heavy use of white space—it’s a distinctive form. Were there other writers besides Phillips who gave you permission or encouragement to do that? Was there a particular blueprint you used as you were constructing the book?

LD: Maggie Nelson’s Bluets was my blueprint, really. That moment I described, when I was working on the road-trip novel and I began writing about the O and E ligature. That was when I was like, “I want to write nonfiction. I want to write lyric essay or memoir in the vein of Bluets or Sarah Manguso’s The Two Kinds of Decay.” There’s this thing in L.A. called Writing Workshops Los Angeles that Edan Lepucki started. That’s how I met Sarah Manguso, actually—I took a one-day poetry workshop with her. Anyway, they had a memoir class, but I was like, “There’s no way in hell I’m going to be able to actually get to this class on time after work and/or have time to participate and read everyone’s work,” but I thought the teacher and the syllabus sounded really interesting, so I contacted her.

Her name is Chris Daley and she’s now running WWLA, and I said, “Can I just do an independent study with you?” And she said yes. We met at a coffee shop and I showed her the pages I had, and said “I love Maggie Nelson and I love Sarah Manguso. I want to write a book that is about my life but is not straightforward memoir. I want it to be more…”

TM: Lyrical.

LD: Yeah. I told Chris, “Here are my pages. I love Bluets. What advice do you have for me?” Some of the pages were about the œ ligature and some were about my open relationship and some were about twins because concurrent to wanting to write this book, I had also had the idea to write a movie about a young married couple who are struggling to grow as individuals while maintaining their bond who meet a set of identical twins and end up getting into a relationship with them—the woman with the one sister and the man with the other sister.

Chris said, “Maybe twins could be your blue.” It was like a lightbulb went off over my head. But it was her head. Then she said, “That’s just a thought—it doesn’t have to be that.” I wasn’t even listening anymore. I was off and running. I hadn’t seen how I could connect all these seemingly disparate ideas and concerns but once she presented it to me, it was so obvious.

TM: It’s always interesting when someone else can see the common themes in your work more clearly than you can.

LD: It made it so much easier to write, because any time I was trying to come up with new material, I would be like, “What about binary stars? Those are twins.” It was like a prompt.

TM: Before writing this book, you existed in two different artistic spheres: dance and advertising. I wonder how ballet and writing ad copy influenced the writing of Vanishing Twins?

LD: To write for advertising, you have to be very concise. I was telling someone the other day that there is a rule that you can’t have more than six words on a billboard. So I was used to cutting things back to their core. Sarah Manguso is all about concision and cutting everything you possibly can, which for me was easy because it’s what I did all day. That I think, definitely informed my style and the way that I write.

For dance, I don’t know. That love of performing might be one of the reasons I write memoir. It’s a way to put myself out on stage in a way. I think I miss that from dancing, that feeling of being out there and being exposed. Somehow I think if I was writing fiction, I would feel more like I was hiding and that wouldn’t be as satisfying.

TM: In the book, you talk about making the decision to cut your hair short and stop wearing makeup—abandoning what some might refer to as performative femininity. At the time, your husband is not into this change. I wonder if that issue has persisted—are you aware of femininity as a performance still?

LD: Ever since I started writing this book I feel like it has allowed me to express the fullness of my identity so I worry less about how I dress or how long or short my hair is. I don’t need my appearance to do all the heavy lifting anymore. My hair is really long right now and I like it, but of course I still sometimes think, “What if I cut my hair really short again?” but I resist because I know my husband likes it longer and at this point in my life and relationship, I want him to find me attractive just like I want to find him attractive. I have a LOT of opinions about his appearance so it’s only fair that he should have them about mine. I’m sure I’d have to have those negotiations with anyone I was in a long-term relationship with, regardless of their gender. I rarely wear makeup anymore which is something I’ve carried over from my more tomboyish days, but occasionally, and I should say VERY occasionally, I put on some lipstick.

TM: It feels a little like a costume to me at this point, especially after having kids. I wasn’t wearing it for a long time because I was too busy, but I do now on occasion. My kids will be like, “You look different. You look pretty.” It’s so weird that they notice that, and weirder that they like it, that they’re already receiving cues about what is “pretty” and that they’ve attached a value to that. It’s so bizarre.

LD: It is. I feel the same way. I’ve always felt weird about wearing makeup that is observable—stuff like red lipstick. I own it and think it’s pretty, but I still feel the same way I felt when my mom put lipstick on me the first time for Halloween when I was eight, and I felt like I couldn’t close my mouth. I still feel like that. I don’t know how to hold my mouth when I’m wearing it.

TM: Did you feel a duty to be honest in this book? Were there things that you specifically left out because you didn’t want to hurt somebody?

LD: I did leave things out. There were other relationships I had while we were open, but they weren’t as significant. They felt extraneous and would have complicated the narrative. I think that was one of the main things I learned about memoir­—that you don’t have to talk about everything. That was the thing that was hardest for me to realize: I have the freedom to give this thing a shape.

You know this as a writer — it’s mostly torture. You have those days when you say, 'This was a great day! The writing went well!' And then if you actually paused and walked back through the writing hour by hour you would realize, 'No, it was still mostly torture, but it was a kind of exquisite and joyous torture on this day, as opposed to the gray horrible torture that it is on most days.'

"I truly believe that we are at a critical crossroads in publishing. As the attention, bandwidth and energy of publishing turns to e-books, we are concerned that what is currently a trend toward lesser quality print versions of books will then become a landslide."

For my friend’s birthday last month, I gave her a tiny zine, three-by-three inches of simply drawn fruits in the bold, limited-color palette of a children’s book. The fruits have sweet, anthropomorphized faces with details added to the pages by hand post-printing, like the glitter gel pen outline of a banana’s half-opened peel (inside, the banana blushes). The orange peers knowingly over its shoulder, showing off a perfectly placed navel-butthole. The carrots, eyes closed, suck each other’s ends. Grapes, in a cluster, fuck.

“Does this artist make these as posters?” my friend asked. “I want these on my kitchen wall.”

That was her introduction to MariNaomi, and it’s not a bad one. Though the minicomic, Dirty Produce, is a departure from the cartoonist’s work in its major points — in full color, wordless, not autobiographical — it gives a glimpse of her signature minimalist design, her sexual frankness, and her joyfully dirty sense of humor.

Her new book, Turning Japanese, picks up not long after Kiss & Tell ends. Mari, in her early-20s, has just gotten out of one serious relationship and into another when she hears of an opportunity to work at a Japanese hostess bar in San Jose. This job soon leads her to another hostess bar, in Japan this time, where she decides to move for a few months with her fiancé, eager to get to know her mother’s home country as an adult.

I talked to Mari over tea at her house in Los Angeles as her two dogs and four cats slept nearby.

TM: In your memoir work, you’re talking so openly and honestly about things that happened to you, but at the same time, I don’t get the sense that it’s confessional or that I’m reading more than you want to show to the reader. How do you find that balance between the stress of reading through and processing all of those difficult experiences and then getting it onto the paper as this compact, confidently told story?

MN: One of the things that people say to me the most after they read my stuff is, “Oh, you’re so honest,” or “You’re so open,” and it’s so funny because pretty much every graphic memoirist I’ve talked to, we all hear that from people, but every single one of us is like, we’re only showing you what we want you to see. There are so many things left out.

TM: Do you feel your relationships have changed now that you publish memoir? Are people more afraid of offending you?

MN: You know, when I started writing Kiss & Tell, which was before I met my boyfriend who would eventually be my husband, I remember hooking up with some guy, and at some point I told him about my project and he was like, “Say goodbye to dating.” Oh, great. People like to ask my husband how he feels about those things, but actually he read my comics, and that was what interested him in me. He liked the honesty. “Honesty” in quotes. The only times there have ever been, I wouldn’t even say issues, are when I want to tell something about our private life, and I’m like, could I write about this? He’s like, no, maybe not. He usually gives in eventually.

TM: Is he a reader for you when you’re in your early stages?

MN: Oh yeah. He’s my muse. Every time I make a comic, I’m either trying to make him laugh or cry, and if he reads it and then hands it back to me and says, “This is good,” I know I’ve failed. I usually get all like, “What do you mean it’s good?!”

TM: I was reading about your parents’ response to Kiss & Tell, that your dad took his time to read through it and your mom just read a little and put it aside for a while.

MN: Forever.

TM: Forever! She never read the whole thing?

MN: I hope not, no, I don’t think so. I spent the whole time between when I got the book deal and when the book came out convincing her not to read the book. She’s only kissed my dad, I mean —

TM: It’s a totally different experience.

MN: Yeah. And she’s never done drugs, or — she’s just coming from such a different place. And she’s my mom. So I would tell her these really horrible parts of the stories to distract her because she’s also very curious, and I knew that at some point she wouldn’t be able to resist. So one of the first things I told her was, “I wrote about my first blowjob. The guy didn’t wash himself, Mom. Do you really want to read that? I drew flies around his penis, Mom. Do you really want to read that?” And she’s like, “No, no, I’m never reading it.” I even tested them out a little, thinking maybe I’d show them a couple of comics and see if they could handle it. There’s a story about when I mooned a little kid, and my mom read that and she said, [gasp!], and I said, “Okay, that’s it! If that shocks you, we’re done.”

TM: When do you decide to hide a person’s identity? Is it when they explicitly say please do this, or does it depend on your relationship?

MN: No one has said that. I guess I opt to hide their identity more than I opt not to. It seems like a good rule of thumb. I mean, I’ve been doing this since the ’90s, and I’ve gone through a lot of trial and error, and I’ve pissed off a couple of people. I can only just try to get better and not hurt people, but I also need to tell my story.

TM: Some people are more sensitive than others, I guess, about those things.

MN: Yeah. And it’s so funny too, when I was doing Kiss & Tell, I didn’t tell everybody who was in it, and there are a couple people, like the dingleberry guy, who I thought, “Am I going to get an angry email from him sometime?” But there are a couple people whose stories I thought were really benign and just kind of cute and when I showed them the stories, one guy in particular was like, “Oh my god, I’m so sad and horrified by how I treated you.” I’m like, “What? It was all consensual.” But you never know.

I did this other comic that didn’t end up in Kiss & Tell because it happened later than age 22, where I went on a couple dates with this prison warden, and I paid more attention to her dog than I did to her. When I showed the comic to her years later, I thought she might be mad, but she loved it. So you just never know. People react differently and you can’t control it. All I can do now is try to avoid getting in trouble.

TM: When did you start keeping journals?

MN: My first one was bought for me right when I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area when I was seven, turning eight. It was my eighth birthday, and I wrote about wanting to have sex with Michael Jackson, at eight years old, which actually was probably my only chance, right? But I was so scandalized that I was having these thoughts that I had to write the word upside down and backwards so that my parents wouldn’t figure it out, the word s-e-x. I think they would have figured it out.

My childhood journals are creepy. I would fly into rages about things. When I’m reading myself as a kid, I think, ugh, maybe that’s why I don’t like kids, because I didn’t like myself as a kid. What a little brat I was.

TM: You’re going back and reading your old journals closely for your new project. Have you been doing that with every project?

MN: Well, this is the first time actually that I’ve gone through the agendas, the schedules, the calendars…They’re so fucking boring, holy crap. The journals are more about feelings, so they’re not painting a very accurate portrayal of what’s going on in my life. For some reason, I felt — and I don’t do this anymore, but I felt that I had to compulsively write down everything: what I ate, but not for any reasons, and it’s not every day, it’s not consistent. Some days it would be, “We went to Mill Valley Market before work, picked up a sandwich, turkey and avocado, and a Pepsi, and in brackets, [bottle].”

TM: So meticulous.

MN: This book was originally going to be about an ex-friend, but I think it’s really going to be about memory.

TM: Do you feel obligated or responsible to be totally truthful?

MN: I feel like responsibility in art is kind of a loaded concept because there’s never any point when I’m creating where I stop myself from saying something. If I did that, I would just stop making art and writing entirely. Because there’s really no way to not offend anybody. Someone’s always going to get offended, no matter what. They’re all bringing their own shit to the table. And the artist’s job really is to tell the story that you want to tell with as little confusion as possible.

Every once in a while, like for Turning Japanese, there are a couple things that, way after the fact, I looked at and thought were kind of offensive and didn’t come out the way I intended, so I took them out. It’s not censorship, exactly, it’s just clarifying.

I wish I could stop time and redraw all my books. Like all the comics that I’ve ever done. But then by the time I’d be done with them, I’d just want to start over again because I’d be that much better. Can’t win.

TM: Isn’t it kind of nice, though, to see how much you’ve changed over time, or how much your technique has changed?

MN: No, I wish I were perfect before. There are certain things that I used to do, like it used to take me so long to do a comic because I was all about stippling and crosshatching, and it just took forever. Sometimes I bother with that stuff now if it’s important, but I guess I read a lot of Robert Crumb, and I was like, I just want to see a million crosshatches!

TM: What are some of the other comics that have influenced you most?

MN: I was motivated to make comics from a specific comic that I read in the anthology Twisted Sisters: A Collection of Bad Girl Art called “The Jelly” by Mary Fleener. That was the definitive point where I went from a reader to a maker. I read it and thought, this is brilliant, and I have stories like this too — I could do this. Here, I’ll show you.

MN: Here it is. So this is her comic. It was about this horrible roommate she had, and I was like, I’ve had horrible roommates, and this is so funny. I love her stuff. It’s so trippy and hilarious and so when I started making comics, this was the first comic I ever made.

TM: When did you make that one?

MN: March 1997?

TM: It’s so different from your current style.

MN: Yeah, it’s so different. But it took forever. I mean, just look at all of those little lines.

TM: What’s something recent that you read and really liked?

MN: So many things! I could give you a list of 100. One that just got re-released is Carol Tyler’s trilogy, You’ll Never Know. It’s a memoir slash biography of her father, who is a vet, and it’s about his PTSD. Another thing that I really love, and this isn’t tainted by the fact that she’s one of my closest friends, is Yumi Sakugawa. She came out with a zine called Never Forgets that, oh my god, just made me cry. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve read in comic form. A non-comics influence would be Cheryl Strayed. Her advice column that got collected into Tiny, Beautiful Things had a huge impact on me.

TM: In Turning Japanese, you’re living in Japan for the first time and learning how to communicate. What is it like for you being in Japan? Do people usually assume that you’re Japanese?

MN: No. I don’t look Japanese to them. When I was doing hostessing there, I was blonde, and no one believed I was part Japanese at all. I would tell them I was half, and they wouldn’t believe me. They always thought I was Spanish or Russian when I was hostessing. When I was working in the San Jose bar, the Japanese visitors or expats, they wouldn’t think that I was Japanese at all either. So, never fit in anywhere [Laughs].

TM: Gives us a good vantage point, though.

MN: I was never big on fitting in, it’s fine. I stopped caring about fitting in at like 8th or 9th grade, but in 6th and 7th grade for some reason, I just really wanted people to think I was cool, which — I was so not cool. There’s a picture of me that I looked at a couple years later and was like, “Oh, that’s why nobody liked me.” I’m going up some staircase and the teacher took a picture of me, and I’ve got super long hair that’s not combed, it’s so all over the place, it’s a middle part, and I’m wearing Sanrio everything. The biggest nerd. I’m wearing hot pink capris and a little sailor thing that goes with it. I mean, this was 6th grade — people were wearing designer jeans and making out. It was a Little Twin Stars set, and then I had a Tuxedo Sam backpack and Tuxedo Sam velcro shoes and a Tuxedo Sam whistle hanging from my neck. I wanted to beat me up, looking at that picture. Wow. I also want to beat me up and steal my Tuxedo Sam backpack because that thing’s awesome. He was my favorite.

TM: You were born in Texas, right? What part of the state did you live in?

MN: Near the panhandle.

TM: I used to live near Dallas, in middle school and high school.

MN: What was the Asian situation there?

TM: I had this friend who was Chinese-American from New York, and we became really close friends and we would watch Bruce Lee movies together. But I remember one day she was going through the yearbook and finding all the Asian people because there weren’t that many, and she was like, “Oh, there’s Julie. She doesn’t count because she was adopted.”

MN: Oh my gosh.

TM: And I was like, wow, what do you think about me then? And our friendship just kind of started to dissolve. But yeah, there weren’t many other Asians around. Was race or being Japanese something you talked about with your mom or your siblings?

MN: No, I don’t think I ever talked about it with them. The first time that I ever really remember talking about race with anyone was with a guy I met who was my first Asian friend, and he was also my first zine friend, and we would talk about, I guess, our moms. But I don’t know, he’s a guy. We would mostly talk about food. I was just so grateful to have someone to talk about that stuff with, I mean, all these things I noticed but had not been able to put to words, certain Japanese customs, certain kinds of passive aggressiveness in the culture, and xenophobia that I had noticed, but I was like, I don’t know, am I just imagining that? There were so many things that I thought were just my mom being quirky, but then I realized later that, oh no, this is a cultural thing. This is completely normal elsewhere.

There was one quarter Japanese—Quapa—guy who went to my middle school for like a year, but he and I avoided each other. And then there was one girl who was Japanese, her parents owned the Japanese restaurant, and we also avoided each other. It was interesting. I mean, already, I guess I felt like I didn’t fit in, so to — I don’t know, maybe not.

TM: It’s very complicated.

MN: Yeah, especially that age.

TM: Has your parents’ relationship with your work changed or are they still nervous about reading it?

MN: Well no, they were happy that my second book (Dragon’s Breath and Other True Stories) was something that they could read, so that was good. The nicest things that my mom has ever told me in my life were about that book. I archive everything in my Gmail, but that’s the one email that I keep out because it’s like, oh, Mom. She doesn’t pay a lot of compliments, so it was really sweet.

I first encountered Azar Nafisi as I was preparing to move from California to Connecticut. In Reading Lolita in Tehran, which I read just two months before departing, Nafisi describes her own “strange” feelings before she left Tehran for the United States. Although I cannot claim a move that momentous, that difficult, her thoughts resonated deeply with me.

Her latest book, The Republic of Imagination, explores the idea that books are important because when we get a glimpse of another person’s life, we can be made to feel connected to their emotions and experiences, and gain a new perspective on our own lives. Her new work emphasizes the importance of fiction in a country where many have begun to deem it a frivolous luxury or useless exercise, through the perspectives of three novels: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis, and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers.

We spoke over the phone, I from my home in rural Connecticut, she at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Charleston, S.C., on her book tour.

The Millions: I wanted to ask you a few questions about what you’ve learned as a writer and a reader, looking at the three different countries you’ve inhabited: Iran and then America and then also the Republic of Imagination as a third country. Of course many things have changed since you first published Reading Lolita in Tehran about 12 years ago. Looking back on that length of time, how have your perceptions of your home country, Iran, changed during that time?

Azar Nafisi: Well, you know, they have not changed substantially in terms of what I thought about Iran’s history and culture and the people, also about the Islamic regime, because the changes that have happened in Iran are rooted in what was happening then. For example, you see Tehran’s streets are much, quote unquote, “nicer” and a lot of restaurants and you see women — of course, the situation of women is like the situation of weather here: you have a little bit of sunshine and then there’s a downpour or a tornado, so you never know. But Iranian women have managed to defy the system at least in terms of appearances. That has changed; if one goes to Tehran today women don’t look the way they did when I left Iran.

But the truth of the matter is that the laws have remained the same, and there is no real security until there is real reform and real change. As you can tell from reading Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, the human rights situation in Iran — the situation of journalists, writers, political prisoners — that also remains the same.

One of the traits I noticed in Iran was this constant defection from within the system. The former revolutionaries and people who were founders of the republic themselves becoming dissidents has accelerated. So for example, the former prime minister [Mir-Hossein] Mousavi, just to give you an example which everyone knows about, and Mehdi Karroubi, our former speaker of the house, are now, they are the ones who are suffering and under house arrest. That tells a lot about this progress towards at least certain segments of civil societies.

TM: In another interview you said the U.S. foreign policy should pursue dialogue not only with the regime in Iran but also with the Iranian people. So how do you think they could do this, especially in light of the recent nuclear agreement?

AN: First of all, the Iranian people — and I am not saying that I’m a spokesperson for them — they don’t really have a spokesperson abroad. That is one problem. So everyone is sort of becoming a self-appointed spokesperson for the people. So I’m not claiming to be that, but the way I see U.S. foreign policy, depending on who is in power, and usually a Democrat or Republican is in power, it sort of vacillates between just sheer belligerence and refusal for any form of dialogue, and then the pendulum goes the other way to sheer compromise with the system. What I really would have loved to see was first of all an understanding of the complexities and paradoxes of that society; and an understanding that in the long run, pragmatically, it is to the American people and American government’s well being to have a more open, flexible, and democratic system in Iran and to really encourage the democratic mind of people in Iran who are now either in jail or their voices are being silenced. You can have a fruitful dialogue with the Islamic regime without forgetting about the rights of the Iranian people.

That is not imposition on another culture. Iran, like other countries that violate human rights like China, like Saudi Arabia, are also benefitting from all the advantages of being members of the United Nations. Under the United Nations, nations swear allegiance to certain universal rights, and these are the rights that Iranian people have been fighting for long before Mr. Khomeini had his revolution; it wasn’t something that the shah granted so that the ayatollah can take away. It was something that people fought for and died for in the Constitutional Revolution at the beginning of the century.

What I’m trying to say is that the negotiations with Iran, which I support — there’s this sort of propaganda all around it, people either being for or against it. I don’t see it like that. I see that there should be negotiations, but the U.S. is negotiating from a position of strength, because Iran never comes to a table unless they feel weak, unless they feel that they are really in a bad position domestically. So while the U.S. is in a position of strength, while they are talking to the Iranian government and obviously compromising on certain issues, they should not compromise on the rights of the Iranian people. And they do. Our administration right now is not even talking about the Iranian Americans who are in jail. That is an insight into the weaknesses of the United States foreign policy, be it Republican or Democrat, and being manipulated. So that is what worries.

As a writer and a woman who believes in rights of women and personal liberty, I don’t take political sides, but I do have a position on the issue of human rights. I have seen that what makes tyrants afraid is not military might. The first people who are sacrificed in these regimes are journalists and writers and poets, and actually those who teach humanities. Those are at the forefront of the struggle and are targets.

TM: I also wanted to ask about how your own experiences under the regime in Iran have then shaped the way you approach American politics and your own level of civic involvement here.

AN: Iran taught me many things. One of the first things I realized was that individual rights and human rights are not God-given gifts to the West. This is an illusion some people in this country and in other democracies have; that they have certain traits that makes them deserve freedom of choice and other freedoms. I think that everyone — and I’ve seen that in Iran in terms of its history and in terms of my own life experiences in that country — that people want a decent life. Nobody hates, no matter what kind of culture you come from, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When I talk about Iran, I don’t differentiate between rights in Iran and rights in America.

The second thing that the Islamic Republic taught me was that these countries we call totalitarian or tyrannical are only distorted and extreme cases of what we could become in a democracy. What a democracy can learn from countries that are more repressive is to understand that freedom is an ordeal. Coming to the United States I find myself again talking about the ordeals that we all face and the challenges we face here. And the challenge that I am trying to face in the U.S. right now is this complacency and conformity.

The last thing is that I realize how important it is to pay attention to culture and history, and that, even if you are thinking about the military conquest, the first thing you have to do is to understand, not to judge. That is why for me fiction becomes so crucial because that is what it teaches us, to first understand and then try to judge.

TM: Thinking about America now, you talked a little in your book about how a lot of Americans have become complacent and they’ve given up some of their freedoms, especially since 9/11. Why do you think Americans have become complacent and allowed that to happen? Another phrase you used in your book was that safety is an illusion, and I think in giving up our freedoms we’ve really prioritized this illusion of safety. Why do you think Americans have done that and have let that happen?

AN: I think that when we go through periods of too much prosperity and too little thinking, it can very easily be translated into a form of smartness and conformity. Now I was away from America for 18 years, so I am only speaking about what happened in this country in those 18 years from other people’s experiences or what I have read, but it seems to me that especially in the ’80s and right into the ’90s there was this transformation into the other side of the American Dream, which is a gross materialism. On one hand we have this mindset, on the other hand within the academia actually and among the intellectuals and policy makers we have this ideological mindset, and I think both of these mindsets, although they are very different in terms of positions they take, are very similar. Both of them are lazy. They don’t want to think — I mean intellectually lazy. To think and to imagine and to genuinely follow the truth or try to understand and reveal the truth is dangerous, it has its consequences. Once you know the truth, then you have to take action. You can’t remain silent. So most people would rather not know. Ideologies always do that.

I was so amazed when I returned to the United States and discovered how polarized this society has become, even in terms of the news — that you don’t listen to the news from people you don’t agree with. Fox News, for example, for me was a very new and strange and gradually scary phenomenon where you negate reality. There is no more news in most of our channels, from left to right. It is an imposition of your own desires and illusions and ideologies upon reality, so reality doesn’t matter. And that makes it easier, because when you and I think that the world is divided into good guys and bad guys, and we’re always on the side of the good guys, it is like Miss Watson in Huckleberry Finn, who believes that the world is divided into those who go to hell and those who go to heaven. And she obviously belongs to those who go to heaven, and in order to go to heaven, all you have to do is not to question, not to understand complexities, not to have curiosity, not to take risks; only see if somebody believes in your set of formulas. That is one thing that really worries me about America.

Alongside of that is this utilitarian pleasure-seeking, comfort-seeking mindset. You know, I think it is amazing, elections for us have turned into a sort of entertainment. People were a little happy watching the Democrats’ recent debate because it at least talked about issues. It frightens me when we watch Donald Trump, because we either want to laugh at him or we genuinely believe in him. Americans now, it seems to be a reign of ignorance. How you could think someone could be your president who is so ignorant of your own history and culture, as well as the history and culture of the world? This is no laughing matter at some point. We see that in our universities where our students want trigger warnings; they don’t want to read novels that make them uncomfortable. You keep hearing the word “uncomfortable.” And then the celebrity culture, we talk about Michelle Obama and Jonathan Franzen and Beyoncé and this phenomenon called Kim Kardashian. You are dissolving people’s individualities, what they really do in real life, into this generalized term. Michelle Obama is the First Lady, Franzen is a writer, Beyoncé is a singer, and Kardashian, God knows what she is. It’s this greed for everything that wants to be new.

In my book, the second chapter “Babbitt,” Babbitt like Henry Ford believes that history is bunk. Memory is bunk. And all they crave is new gadgets. We have all become like Babbitt, dying to know the latest Apple iPhone or iPad, staying up and queuing in front of the stores to get the new gadgets. The world is going up in flames, in churches people are killing people, our schools are no more secure and we are yet wanting to feel comfortable. I can go on forever, but that is why I said that we need to be able to reflect, to think, to take risks, and to imagine a world not just as it is, but as it should or could be. Otherwise how could you and I vote if we do not learn in schools our own history and the history of the world, our own culture and the culture of the world? How do we have the ability to think and make choices? These are questions that bother me. They are different from the questions that bothered me in Iran where my life was sometimes in danger, but I still feel that something very precious is in danger in this country.

TM: Building on that a little bit, one thing that I noticed in your book was you talked about political correctness. Some would argue that political correctness was born out of a need to redress grievances and show respect to those that have been marginalized, but in your book you point out that political correctness leads to “comfortable questions and easy, ready-made answers.” What alternative would you present to political correctness? How can we still show that respect without putting everyone’s ways of thought into a box?

AN: All of these matters like political correctness, like multiculturalism, came out of a desire to respect others and be curious about others. But the point is that you cannot create these things into a set of formulas, and you cannot assign people to a situation. I think that is dangerous. That is the difference between what I saw under conditions that were far more difficult; for example when we talk about or see documentaries on civil rights movements, when people were fighting for their rights very seriously, you had a conviction and despite the fact that the others or the society or the law tried to victimize you, you refused that victimized status. Nowadays someone who is wearing that status will condescendingly talk about others: “Don’t hurt their sensitivities.” It is not about hurting sensitivities, it is about changing mindsets. Mindsets are not changed by some thug calling women all sorts of names, or calling minorities all sorts of names, and then tomorrow coming on TV to apologize. Or by forbidding people to talk in a way or punishing them the way we are. All we are doing is not changing people’s mindsets, we are making them just become silent and build resentment and then they’ll come out on the attack when the time comes.

As a woman who comes from a particular place like Iran…let me just give you the examples of women in Iran. What women in Iran realized, in comparison with their own past and in comparison with what they desire, was that they were genuine victims of the regime. When you are forced to marry at the age of nine or stoned to death or are flogged, these things make you real victims; it’s not somebody calling you names. But we could have done two things: either just accept that victim status or to actively resist it by not becoming like our oppressors. I think that is the greatest lesson I have learned from James Baldwin. Baldwin talks about the most dangerous thing was not those white racists but the hatred that they stimulated in him, which made him become them.

So if we are victims of race or class or gender rather than constantly complaining or forbidding people to talk about these things, we should stand up and we should act so that people know we are not victims. We refuse that status. If I refuse that status, then whatever somebody says is not going to hurt me. That is what I mean by everybody wanting to be comfortable and find solutions by forbidding, but this forbidding has no end, because you’ll notice that the right is constantly bothered and sensitized about whether we will have another Christmas celebration or not or wants to ban Harry Potter or evolution from the schools; and the left might call The Great Gatsby misogynist or Huckleberry Finn racist, and want to make our job easy and kick them out. What I want to say to people is that the domain of imagination and thought is the only domain where blasphemy and profanity can exist. That is where we should be free to roam and to question and be questioned.

So my students should not only read those writers who for example were fighting against fascism, but they should also understand what Hitler was all about. That domain is the domain of free thought and freedom of the imagination, and we are limiting it by ideology.

That is what I was trying to practice in my classes. I would never begin with theory, because I didn’t want my students to be intimidated or influenced by somebody who they think knows better. So first of all I would have them read the text and talk about the text and come up with their own ideas about the text. Then I would ask them to read theories that I myself hated, but I would not tell them, I would have them read theories from all sides and come to their own conclusion. I don’t want my students to all take the same political positions that I do, but I want them to think and be able to defend their ideas and be able to have that intellectual courage to stand up for their principles.

TM: So if you could give a reading list of a few more works important to the Republic of Imagination, what would those books be?

AN: There are so many. First of all, I don’t believe I have explained it fully in my book; the point about my book was that I ended at a specific period in time because I felt that the 1960s were a time of transition both in terms of American culture as well as politics and society, and whatever we are dealing with now, both good and bad, is partly because of what happened in the ’60s and ’70s.

The second thing is that I had about 24 people on the list for this book, which I reduced to what you see now. For example, I wanted to talk about Herman Melville’sBartleby; I love that guy who keeps saying, “I prefer not to.” If we talk about before the ’60’s, FlanneryO’Connor, Kurt Vonnegut, and some of the lesser known, I believe, minor masterpieces, like Nathanael West’sMiss Lonely Hearts and The Day of the Locust; I think he beautifully predicts our society today. Of course I mentioned Stoner in my book, but I also love David Foster Wallace, I love Geraldine Brooks, and some of the works by Nicole Krauss. These are writers who are too close to my time and I need to digest them more in order to be able to write about them more. Of course mystery, I would love to write about Raymond Chandler and science fiction like Ray Bradbury or Philip K. Dick.

TM: Do you think you’d ever publish a list of those 24 people that you wanted to write about? Because I think you should!

AN: I’d love to! You know, one of my problems, and I mentioned it in one of my books, is that in terms of books, I’m very promiscuous. There are so many books that I want to write about. I was in Italy for my book last month and I kept thinking, “Oh my god, I want to write about so many of these books now!” I hope I will at least get a chance to write about some of them. It is so joyous to be able to share the books you love.

TM: How would you say that fiction influences and changes the future, from people’s hearts to the changes we make in our societies to even the inventions we create?

AN: Well you know, I believe that fiction, telling stories, is essential to our nature as human beings. If you go back to the first stories that are Greek and Roman mythology, to the Bible to the Qur’an, until you come to epic fiction and all of that, you notice that fiction comes out of curiosity, and curiosity is the first step towards change. Both science and literature are very much dependent on this curiosity. Because to be curious means to leave yourself behind and search for something that you don’t know, and enter a world like Alice and her Wonderland, enter a world that you have not visited before. And that experience, like traveling to other lands, learning other people’s languages, it changes you.

You might not notice the change in a very concrete way, but it changes your perspective on the world. It expands your perspective; it washes your eyes and you look at yourself through the eyes of other people. So I feel that that is one of the greatest contributions of fiction in terms of preserving our humanity. It also gives us continuity because it is the guardian of memory, and that is why I’m so amazed when I read something that was written some years ago and it seems as if they predicted what we are now.

The last thing of course is that fiction touches the heart. It makes you connect to other people through your heart and that experience of connection through the heart is also life changing — to be able to, for a minute even, become another person and then come back to your own being.

TM: You love fiction so much; would you ever consider writing a novel? Or have you decided nonfiction is more of what you want to write?

AN: Well, you know, maybe this is my weakness or obsession that I think for me fiction is the highest form of writing. To tell you the truth, sometimes I’m very scared. I mean, I write for myself; I have loads of pages and now computer files of all these things that I have written, but that is one part of it. The other part of it is that I was fascinated — since I wrote my first book in Iran — by these intersections between fiction and reality and how reality turns into fiction and vice versa, how they change one another. And I think for as long as I have that obsession, it will be difficult to make the leap. I don’t want to write fiction which is really just disguised biography. So I hope one day I will reach that stage before I die. Maybe I’ll write my last book as a novel and then die. I want nothing, nothing else in the world.

I’m surprised to hear that you communists overseas are using your own individual sharpeners in classrooms. It’s a very Ayn-Randian position to take. “I’ve got my pencil sharpener, fuck you if you can’t afford a pencil sharpener! Sharpen your pencil with your bootstrap!”